Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted The role of sequence organization in the enhancement of working memory in children and throughout later stages of the human lifespan(University of Leicester, 2024-06-01) Albatli, Alanoud; Albatli, AlanoudThis thesis examined the impacts of path characteristics and structural sequences on working memory (WM) performance using spatial and verbal tasks involving different stages of memory. In Experiments 1-3, participants performed better on structured verbal tasks than on unstructured ones. Young and older adults had larger pupil sizes for unstructured sequences during the rehearsal, whereas children had larger pupil sizes during rehearsal than encoding. Young and older adults performed better than children on the structured sequences during the verbal task. Also, children had higher average pupil sizes on the structured sequences than young adults (for the spatial task during encoding) and older adults (for the verbal task during rehearsal). In Experiment 4, young adults had higher recalling scores on short than on long sequences and the absence of crossing than the presence of crossing when structured sequences are considered. Additionally, participants recalled more correct items in the absence of crossing than in the presence of crossing when unstructured sequences were considered. In Experiment 5, children recalled better for structured, long and sequences without crossings, with older children recalling better for sequences without crossings than younger children. In Experiment 6, older adults recalled better for structured, short, and sequences without crossing, with middle-aged adults recalled better in the absence of crossings than older adults. Additional analysis revealed that older adults benefited more from structured, long, and sequences with no crossing than children while both adult groups benefitted more from unstructured, short, and the presence of crossing sequences in comparison to children. These results suggest that when encoding sequence structure lacks effective strategies, rehearsing requires more mental effort reflected by increased pupil size, particularly during the rehearsal of unstructured sequences. Recall performance relates to sequence complexity. There are changes in spatial performance across different age groups that were not observed previously.18 0